Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

40 Jean Piaget
the stages of learning and intelligence from the level of insects and cephalopods
to the level of human life; in a very stimulating study, K. Lorenz has shown
how modern theories on the instincts could be extended in an aprioristic interpretation
(K. Lorenz is a Kantian!) of the principal categories of human thought.
Without necessarily adopting this solution, it is in any case impossible today to
consider the ‘subject’ as detached from nature, since the most general trends in
biology and ethology are to consider behaviour and organic life as closely linked,
and to study the animal as a subject.
11. A second area in which the natural sciences and the sciences of man meet is
through the exchange of methods. W e stress the word ‘exchange’, for it will be
seen that the service is reciprocal.
In the first place it goes without saying that the sciences of man are increasing-
ly led to use statistical and probabilistic methods, as well as abstract models
elaborated in the field of the natural sciences (Chapter vnr will develop this
point). One single example of these logico-mathematical structures, owed to the
natural sciences, which have been of service to the sciences of man, is the well-
known convergence between the concepts of entropy in physics and in the
theory of information. At a first glance there would seem to be nothing less
likely to create a link between disciplines so far removed from one another as
thermodynamics and linguistics. But in working out a mathematical theory of
information and in comparing the structures of the expressions used to define an
increase of information in relation to ‘rumours’ and disorder, it was discovered
that, from an essentially formal point of view and in relation to the symmetries
involved, a certain isomorphism between these functions and those used in
research on entropy did actually exist. In such a case the techniques acquired in
a natural science threw a clear light on those which had to be worked out to
solve a difficult problem of central interest to the sciences of man.
Supporters of the specificity of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ can naturally
argue that such examples, however numerous they may be, prove nothing, but
simply point to the ‘naturalistic’ attitude to be found more and more frequently,
and according to them mistakenly, in the sciences of man. But there is an answer
to this, and a very good one, for it is the sort of argument likely to reassure
those who fear that the concept of the originality of superior human behaviour
may be weakened by such parallels. It so happens, and increasingly, that the
sciences of man, merely borrowing the broad general model which combines
logico-mathematical deduction and experiment from the natural sciences, are
led to build up certain new logico-mathematical techniques to meet their own
ends: and that these techniques - intended for strictly ‘human’ purposes - have
in many cases been found to cast new light on the natural sciences and to throw
up unexpected solutions to points which ‘natural‘ scientiik techniques had so
far been unable to elucidate. In other words, if there is a trend to ‘naturalize’
the sciences of man, there is also a trend to ‘humanize’ certain ‘natural’ techniques.
A first example of this may be found in the theory of information which,
after drawing its formal inspiration from thermodynamics, had a reverse effect